Vision and Challenges for Realising the Internet of Things

emerging uses and services, and launch and learn scenarios. Resonance, not interaction, is the
design principle in environments where connectivity is everywhere yet not always accessible to
individual users.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new actualization of subject-object relationships. Me and my
surroundings, objects, clothes, mobility, whatever, will have an added component, a digital
potentiality that is potentially outside of 'my' control. Every generation builds its own add-ons
to the notions of reality, to what it believes are the foundations of the real. What makes this
move so different?
There is a table. On the table a glass. A glass of tea, Jasmine? Jasmine tea. Hmm, good tea. I
reach for the glass in a hurry, I gotta run. My hand, it feels like sweeping it off the table yet
gently grasps it. I am not in a hurry at all. I can take it in my hand and admire the engravings.
I can see drops of condensed water gently not quite sliding over the edge. I am not in a
hurry. I pour you a glass. I offer it to you. Here, a glass of Jasmine tea. There are a great
number of ways to reach out for a glass. And now this glass is the one your grandmother
gave to you on her dying bed. You put it on the table. Pour out Jasmine tea. The affordances
of a lifetime, the scope of a generation, as you reach out for the cup, the gesture itself become
the reality that bridges worlds. 41
What is most likely to happen in my opinion? A child will grow up and see a glass on that table.
She will put her mobile phone/device/cuddle next to the glass. She wants to find out what
it is, what it means. She will for evermore and from the beginning of her time do this with and
through mediating devices. And lo and behold, a movie starts playing on its cuddle, triggered
by the tag embedded in the glass. The movie is scripted by the Jasmine tea providers who tell
the stories they want to tell. Finally the real has become scriptable and the scriptable becomes
the real.
3 A political revolution
The primary claim to data gathering, determining what data is in the first place, what the
status of information is, and how knowledge is to be made operational, is no longer wed to
universities and academic institutions. Neither is its output: essay, report, document - the sole
format through which broadly shared notions on what is acceptable and real can be spread.
Networks of professional amateurs, informed citizens and self-taught experts as well as science
itself are looking for new trusted formats of transmitting data, information and knowledge.
The expertise of designers and artists in designing broadly shared events, conferences,
local workshops, flash mob seminars in streets and neighbourhoods, foregrounding humour,
irony, passion and love, is essential.
Maybe it can be the positive solution, the logical step in the history of outsourcing memory to
objects, devices and the environment, for the challenges we all face today of an ever growing
individualization that might tempt citizens into breaking with the existing solidarities (among
race, gender, ethnicity, age…) that are currently harnessed through the nation state. What if
through the Internet of Things we can create a layer of data, open to all, through which individuals
can decide for themselves what they are willing to pay for, get direct feedback from
their voluntary donations, coordinate community spending that has a direct bearing to their
needs through participatory budgeting, negotiate with other people in other parts of the world
how to use their money?
4 A bartering revolution
There is a broad growing consensus that current monetary systems are not working for any of
the stakeholders in the long run, whether it is citizens, lenders, shareholders, investors. They
might all profit maximally at one particular point in the cycle but overall loss and gain seems
to even out. IoT seems to favour micropayments and transparency in transaction. We can envisage
a definition of IoT identity as an ever-changing mix of relations between the physical
body of a person, his or her objects and a ‘smart’ environment: privacies. Monitoring mechanisms
will be built into devices themselves. It is unproductive to attempt to isolate old constants
in such an environment. The privacy of objects is just as relevant or irrelevant as the
privacy of persons in this fluid ecology that is called ‘identity’.
41 Rob van Kranenburg, 5 February 2010, http://www.newtechacademy.eu/
CERP-IoT – Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things
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